LARGO, Md. — "We really know how to stop things," Peter Townshend said during a rare quiet moment in his life. "It's starting that we have a bit of trouble with."

With that, rock's most flamboyant guitarist kicked off the farewell tour for rock's most trouble-prone band, The Who, which will be in Toronto Oct. 9.

Townshend had ended Tuesday night's rehearsal by cutting one of his fingers. He began last night's concert at the Capital Centre with several enormous leaps which took him close to falling into the 20,000-strong crowd.

What followed was classic Who — mercilessly loud, sometimes brilliant, sometimes brash, but always coming from the centre of the heart of rock. These kids are alright — except they are not kids anymore.

Union Jacks fluttered throughout the packed crowd and singer Joan Jett was backstage for a concert that began with Substitute and ended with a great version of the Beatles' old hit, Twist And Shout.

'Entire history'

Everything that followed amounted to what singer Roger Daltrey explained before the show "was our entire history."

Newer pieces such as It's Hard were squeezed in with older songs such as Who Are You.

"At times I feel we're over the hill," Daltrey said before the show. "You can only do this so long," Townshend added.

Too old, at it too long — not only was the band older than most of the fans in the crowd, its songs were older as well. This was a much younger crowd than turned out for the Rolling Stones' tour last year — younger and more vocal.

The tour is just beginning to take shape. Part one has 25 dates, including Toronto and Oct. 31 in Tempe, Ariz. But part 2, starting Nov. 26 in Atlanta, has yet to have all of its dates filled in. Early estimates have the band playing to more than 500,000 people and grossing more than $7.5 million (when asked if anything would be missing from his life if The Who broke up, Townshend once said; "Yeah, I'd say about a million dollars a year.")

A sponsor

Tour organizers worry, however, that this will look too much like the Rolling Stones' last tour. Like the Stones, The Who have a sponsor, a brewery — the Stones had a cosmetics firm. There's even talk of a final television show and a European leg of the tour.

"There are significant differences," a spokesman pointed out yesterday. "For one thing, The Who will likely play only 40 concerts in all. The Stones did 50. For another, there's a completely different kind of mood. There's an intensity here — almost a tension."

And with reason. Last night's concert, the first of the tour with its modest light show and state-of-the-art sound, was hassle-free. But The Who's past still haunts it. It was on the last tour when 11 fans were asphyxiated and 10 injured at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum in December of 1979.

But a band with its future coming to an end has time to deal with its past.

Jump-off: Lead guitarist Peter Townshend got The Who's tour off to a flying start in Maryland last night, almost falling into crowd of 20,000, Peter Goddard reports.